Eminent Oddball

LYTTON STRACHEY by Michael Holroyd. Two volumes, 1,229 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $21.95.

We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilization. We are greater than our fathers; we are greater than Shelley; we are greater than the 18th century; we are greater than the Renaissance; we are greater than the Romans and the Greeks. What is hidden from us? We have mastered all We have abolished religion, we have founded ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown our strange illumination in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated love.

The year was 1904, and scattered about Europe half a dozen men, unacquainted with one another, were lighting the fuse of the post-Victorian revolution--Einstein, Freud, Lenin, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky. But they didn't matter at all. For in Cambridge, England, 24-year-old Lytton Strachey was loudly proclaiming that he and his fellow members of the Apostles, a small society of intellectuals, were about to inherit the earth. They never quite made it, but in their later guise as the Bloomsbury Group--Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell among others--they did become the most powerful extra-Establishment gang that England has seen in this century.

In Lytton Strachey, English Biographer Michael Holroyd argues that the author of Eminent Victorians belongs in the forefront of the Bloomsberries, and then substantiates the claim through 1,229 improbably fascinating pages. Strachey's is one of the legitimately original voices of the era, and it has suffered from a conspiracy of ear plugging. Though his work has always been read, especially in the U.S., his reputation after his death in 1932 was increasingly demeaned by historians, who dismissed his readability as shallowness, his hyperbole as untruthfulness, and his point of view as malicious bias. In Eminent Victorians, Strachey provided four desecrating portraits of some of the era's most sacred cows. Admirers of the work are well reminded, as Cyril Connolly wrote, that "it might be described as the first book of the twenties. He struck the note of ridicule which the whole war-weary generation wanted to hear, using the weapon of Voltaire on the creators of the Red Cross and the Public School System. To the postwar young people it was like the light at the end of a tunnel."

Marshmallow Bogs. Eminent Victorians was a light at the end of a tunnel for its author too. The eleventh of 13 children of a Victorian soldier-scientist, Lytton Strachey grew up as the most squirrelly member of a pandemoniously eccentric household. The grotesque English public school system did little for him except inspire the literary decapitation, in Eminent Victorians, of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the spartan Christian of Rugby. By the time Lytton reached Cambridge in 1899, he was a distinct oddity--a gangly, shrill-voiced, germ-ridden, manic-depressive esthete, caustic as lye except when caught in the eternally adolescent marshmallow bogs of homosexual passion. "Duncan Grant is the full moon of heaven," he wrote to Maynard Keynes, who was one of his earliest friends and confidants. In fact, Keynes was something more. Holroyd discloses that like Strachey, Keynes was a homosexual and a frequent rival for the affections of winsome young men; it was a proclivity that did not affect Keynes's later standing as one of the world's great economists.

Despite Strachey's reputation as perhaps the most brilliant of the Apostles, he was denied a fellowship by Cambridge, took only second-class honors, and left the university in 1905 to begin 13 years of scratch-penny frustration as a book reviewer and minor literary essayist. Then in 1918, after two years of fierce work in defiance of his chron ically miserable health, he brought out the four devastating historical essays--on Dr. Arnold, Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale and Chinese Gordon--that shredded all lingering pretensions of Victorian moral eminence. "The his torian of Literature," Strachey had once written, "is the historian of exploded reputations"; by diligently dynamiting the reputations of others, he built his own. In his last 14 years, he wrote two exceedingly successful biographies, Queen Victoria and Elizabeth and Essex. But it was Eminent Victorians that opened the way to the wholesale and often unfair assault on Victorianism that has preoccupied England and America for the past 50 years.

Lugubrious Comedy. Holroyd is thorough and judiciously appreciative in his treatment of Strachey's work, but he reserves his full concentration for the egomaniacal oddball himself. The biographer was given access, by Strachey's brother James, to 30,000 letters that flowed between Lytton, his family and his Bloomsbury intimates. In his letters, he disgorged himself of the full, untidy range of his lusts, ambitions, despair, sickness, vanity and, best of all, his maliciously acute observations of the people and places he knew. The letters alone make an overwhelming self-portrait, and to them Holroyd adds a detailed scholarship that makes lugubrious comedy out of the slightest trivia, including the fact that Lytton was "suffering acutely from piles and carrying with him everywhere an air cushion which he had hired for one-and-six a week."

Strachey's strangest alliance was with a woman, of all people--a hoydenish little kook named Dora Carrington, described by a friend as "a tin of mixed biscuits." Carrington met him at a house party in 1915. He offended her one evening, and next morning she crept into his bedroom, intending to cut off his beard by way of revenge. Instead, she fell in love with him, and moved in to take care of him for the rest of his life. That was fine with Strachey, who later fell in love with a beau of Carrington's named Ralph Partridge. Carrington married Partridge and shared him with Lytton; when Partridge fell in love with another woman and Carrington had a fling, the menage a trois became Waterloo Station. Though Strachey failed in a few gentlemanly attempts to consummate his fondness for Carrington, she remained in permanent thrall to him and committed suicide after his death from cancer at 51.

Wherever possible, Holroyd allows Strachey to speak for himself, whether he was dropping Bloomsbury epigrams (on T. S. Eliot: "I fear it will take him a long time to become a letter writer"), or taking his place as the boldest public wit since Wilde. Strachey never hesitated to flaunt his homosexual inclina tions. His finest moment may have come during his court hearing as a conscientious objector in 1916, when he was asked what he would do if he saw a German soldier raping his sister. Strachey paused two beats, then remarked: "I would try to interpose my own body."

Holroyd notes in his preface that "it may seem ironic that the life and work of Lytton Strachey should finally be commemorated by two fat volumes--that standard treatment of the illustrious dead that he was so effective in stamping out." Ironic it is, but not half so much as it would have been if his biographer had followed Strachey's example and given short shrift to one of the best subjects of this century.

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